


Permanent Record, Part 2

by skivvysupreme



Series: The Cuffed Verse [13]
Category: Glee
Genre: Bullying, Cheerio Blaine, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Skank Kurt Hummel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 09:41:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8885989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skivvysupreme/pseuds/skivvysupreme
Summary: Blaine wracks his brain for all the offhanded bits and pieces of Kurt’s past that he’s collected so far. There’s the virginity thing, the Cheerio thing, getting arrested, Scandals, the Glee club exit Kurt blatantly refused to talk about just this morning… The root of all this could be anywhere, so Blaine settles on a familiar place. “Remember when you said you’d thought about going to Dalton? Why did you want to transfer? And… why didn’t you go?”





	

Kurt hasn’t said a word since they left the Scandals parking lot.

Blaine glances over at him every so often from the driver’s seat, but he can’t bring himself to say anything. Kurt still seems unsettled, curled up in the passenger seat with his arms wrapped around himself. It’s scary, if Blaine’s honest, and the silence is far from comfortable.

“This—today has been—” Blaine stops, sighs, and anxiously flexes his hands around the steering wheel. He can see Kurt in the corner of his eye, staring out the window and looking at nothing.

“Started shitty, ended shitty,” Kurt replies. He looks exhausted.

Blaine thinks of their awkward morning and tense afternoon with a fair amount of guilt in his stomach. The spark in Kurt’s eye has been flickering and threatening to go out all day, ever since Blaine pushed him away at his locker and showed Kurt how much of a coward he is. Kurt had said he understood, and didn’t want Blaine to beat himself up over it, but if there’s a reason this day ‘started shitty,’ Blaine’s pretty sure it comes down to him.

He pulls into the Hummels’ driveway and parks the car, then reaches over and gently pulls one of Kurt’s hands from where it’s hidden in his folded arms. “You don’t have to tell me everything right now if you don’t want to. We could save it for tomorrow, or any other day. I mean, I do need to hear it, and I know I’m the one who wanted to talk about it tonight, but if it’s too much right now, I can wait.”

Kurt finally looks at him, tired blue-green eyes blinking slowly as he shakes his head. “If we wait, then I have to feel like this even longer. Let’s talk.”

They separate to get out of the car, but reach for each other immediately once they’re on the path up to the front door of the house. Kurt turns on his heels, squeezing Blaine’s hand, and asks, “Can you stay over? I mean, I know it’s a school night and you were supposed to go home after Scandals but—” Kurt shuts his mouth, looking at his boots, at the shrubs to his left, at a dimly lit house across the street, until Blaine slides his free hand around the back of Kurt’s neck and lifts up on his toes to kiss him.

“Of course I’ll stay.”

“Your mom—?”

“I’ll stay, Kurt.”

*

“Hey, buddy.”

“Hey, Dad.”

“Hi, Mr. Hummel…”

Kurt’s father turns around in his seat at the sound of Blaine’s voice, peering suspiciously over the back of his armchair. “Hey Blaine… What are you doing here?”

Before either of them can answer, a woman with short, dark blonde hair and a big sweet, smile walks out from the nearby bathroom. “Hey honey. Oh, is this Blaine? So nice to meet you, I’m Kurt’s stepmom, Carole.”

“Nice to meet you too,” Blaine says automatically, and a little nervously, since they now have two parents to convince of their proposal instead of just one.

“Kurt? You look like you’ve been crying, honey, are you okay?” Carole puts a hand on his arm, glancing down at how tightly he’s clinging to Blaine.

Blaine sees Kurt’s father watching warily from the living room, behind Carole. “What happened, Kurt?”

Kurt shakes his head and drops his voice. ““Carole, can Blaine stay over tonight?”

“It’s a school night.”

“Mrs. Hummel—”

“Call me Carole, sweetie.”

Blaine laughs anxiously—he’s never been able to call anyone’s parents by their first names—and says, “We won’t stay up super late, we know we have school tomorrow. It’s just… um.” He isn’t sure how Kurt wants to word this, or how much he wants to share with his parents right now. He isn’t sure how much they already know.

“Remember last year,” Kurt asks in that same quiet voice, hoping only Carole and Blaine can hear him, “when things got, um… when I promised I’d say something if I wasn’t okay?”

Carole’s whole body seems to deflate a little, and she opens her mouth like she wants to ask more questions, but Kurt just swallows and whispers, “Please?”

“We’ll be on our best behavior, Mrs. Hummel, I promise.”

She takes one more look at Kurt and nods her head, whispering, “Blaine, spare towels are in the linen closet at the end of the hallway. I’ll talk to Burt.” She wraps one arm around Kurt and steps up on her toes to hug him while rubbing a comforting hand on Blaine’s shoulder. “Let me know if either of you need anything.” 

*

Blaine’s sliding into his own pair of gray sweatpants—the pair he gave Kurt—and a too-big t-shirt that Kurt gave him when Kurt walks into his bedroom, face washed and looking a little calmer. He sits at the edge of his bed, looking up at Blaine with a soft smile on his face.

“You seem more relaxed.”

“My nightly skincare regimen does wonders. So does having you here.”

Blaine’s cheeks warm, pleasantly surprised at how easily Kurt said that, and he sits next to him and kisses his cheek. His face smells of tea tree oil and coconut.

“What did your mom say? What did you tell her?”

Blaine picks up his phone to show him the texts.

**Can I stay at Kurt’s house tonight?**

**_Lol blaineybee it’s monday are you drunk_ **

**No!!! His parents are here, we’ll go to school in the morning. He needs me. Please?**

**_Oh no what happened?? Is he ok??? Are u ok??? U can stay in that case but text me in the morning_ **

**Scandals was weird but we’re okay**

**Thanks mom <3**

**_When do I get to meet him_ **

**_Send him hugs frm me, love u bee_ **

Kurt grins at the last messages. “Your mom seems really cool. She knew we were going to Scandals?”

“Yeah, well… I told her it was teen night at this gay lounge—”

“’Lounge’ is a stretch.”

“—and she’s been really encouraging and supportive with this stuff since she and my dad split up so I knew she’d be okay with it. Obviously, I had to leave out the fake ID thing.”

“Yeah… ‘Blaineybee,’ like a bumblebee. That’s adorable.” Kurt looks down and runs a finger over the plaid pattern in his pajama pants.

Blaine watches him for a few moments before he finally says, “What’s the story?”

Kurt sighs, shaking his head and smoothing his hands over his knees. “God, so much happened.”

Blaine has so many questions. His questions have questions. He wants to start at the beginning, and while he doesn’t know where the beginning is, he suspects it isn’t Chandler. “Do you mind if we lay down? I think this will be a long story.”

Kurt nods, and they lay on their sides on top of the blankets, facing each other. He hugs his pillow, burying his face in it for a moment before he looks over at Blaine.

He wracks his brain for all the offhanded bits and pieces of Kurt’s past that he’s collected so far. There’s the virginity thing, the Cheerio thing, getting arrested, Scandals, the Glee club exit Kurt blatantly refused to talk about just this morning… The root of all this could be anywhere, so Blaine settles on a familiar place. “Remember when you said you’d thought about going to Dalton? Why did you want to transfer? And… why didn’t you go?”

“Wow… you know how to get right to the heart of things, don’t you?”

He shrugs the shoulder that isn’t pressed into Kurt’s mattress. “Is that the heart of things?”

Kurt nods. “Have you asked anybody in Glee club about this? They like to talk.”

“No. Rachel has brought you up a couple times. Mainly to try and get me to get you to join again, because Finn’s gotten nowhere with that, apparently. Mercedes and Artie and Mr. Schue asked how you’re doing. And Tina tried to tell me about last year as soon as I told her we got together, but I wanted to hear it from you. I figured they wouldn’t know everything there is to tell, if you stopped talking to them.”

At Kurt’s wince, Blaine goes on, “Mercedes told me that. She said you two had been drifting apart, but one day, you just disappeared on her.”

“She was my best friend,” says Kurt, picking at a loose thread on the end of his pillowcase. “She was the first person I came out to. We joined the Cheerios together sophomore year because we wanted a chance to shine and Rachel was hogging the spotlight. We—” Kurt sighs, sniffling, “—god, we used to talk so much shit about Rachel. Fuck, I miss Mercedes.”

Blaine feels his chest getting heavy at the sadness on Kurt’s face. “So, what happened?”

Kurt takes a deep breath and lets it out in a bitter laugh. “McKinley’s not a great school to start with, but it was way worse for me. I wasn’t always like this.”

“Like what?”

“This time last year, my hair was all brown. I wasn’t pierced. I didn’t smoke. I certainly didn’t hang out with Puck, though Quinn and I had our moments.”

“You weren’t… a Skank?”

Kurt shakes his head, then rolls over and reaches underneath his bed. He pulls out a large shoebox and drops it between the two of them. “This was me,” he says, opening the box and handing Blaine a photograph.

Blaine’s mouth drops open. The boy beaming at him from the photo, dressed to match the surrounding Glee club in a black shirt and dress pants with a gold satin tie, is some sort of rosy-cheeked cherub with neat, dark hair who appears to be about six inches shorter than the leggy, wild-haired boy lying across from Blaine on the bed. He has a hand on Artie’s shoulder and an arm around Mercedes.

“What a different kind of cute,” Blaine says softly, looking back and forth between his Kurt and the picture. “Quinn looks so different, too. She… oh my god, is she—?”

“Pregnant? Yeah. She had the baby that night, actually. Nobody told you about that?”

The blonde-haired Quinn in the picture, in a shimmery metallic dress with gold trim, is cradling her belly with one hand and holding onto Mercedes with the other.

“No, they didn’t… Puck?”

“Yeah.”

 “And it looks like she was close with Mercedes, too?”

“She was, for a little while. Quinn was in Glee club all last year, but this — sophomore year — was my last competition. I quit right before Sectionals last fall, when they tied with the Warblers.”

“I could have met you. Seen you, at least. I didn’t remember seeing Quinn before until I looked at this. I can’t believe this is the same girl... When you quit, was that when you wanted to switch schools?”

Kurt nods. “I wonder about it, sometimes. How different things would be now, if I’d transferred then.”

Blaine sets the photo back in the box, rests a warm hand on Kurt’s hip, and waits.

“I couldn’t… things were bad. I was always bullied at McKinley, but Karofsky made it very specific.”

“Who?”

“David Karofsky. He changed schools, you wouldn’t know him. But he was a football player and the leader of the football-playing assholes, and he decided that I was his to torment. And before you ask,” Kurt sighs, his voice going hard, “no, no one helped me. Not in any way that mattered.”

“I wasn’t going to. I know how that goes. I know they didn’t.”

“I was invisible for so long. I thought, ‘I could just disappear and no one would care.’ When I joined the Glee club, that changed. But when things got bad, no one saw it. No one noticed. And even though I had friends, I was still alone. And I was afraid all the time, but I couldn’t — I couldn’t tell anyone exactly what was so scary about Karofsky. Maybe I should have, I just didn’t think I had the right to.”

Blaine shakes his head. “Of course you had the right to, Kurt! Your safety comes first, you always have the right—”

“To out people? No, I don’t.”

Blaine freezes.

“Karofsky kissed me. I finally plucked up the courage to confront him, I got in his face and I asked — I demanded to know what his problem was, what he was so afraid of. And he grabbed my face and he kissed me. And from that point on, once I knew, things got worse. He would stare at me, and get in my space, or wink at me when he knew no one was looking, and even though he wasn’t hitting me, it was…” Kurt curls in on himself a little, gripping his pillow.

“Kurt…”

“I used to dare him to hit me, when that’s what he was threatening. A punch was just a punch, and I knew how to use concealer. But when his bullying became something different… He was bigger and stronger than me, and he wanted me, I guess, and no one ever listened to me, so…”

Blaine’s skin crawls. “Did you think he would…?”

“I didn’t know. That was the worst part. I just didn’t know. I could never tell what he was going to do. And I refused to out him, so I couldn’t explain what was happening in any way that anyone would take seriously enough to do something about it.”

The thought of Kurt facing Karofsky alone is already horrifying, but picturing the sweeter and softer-looking Kurt of that time in that scenario makes it so much worse. “It would have been perfectly acceptable to out him in that situation. You shouldn’t have had to deal with that on your own. I would have helped you.”

“I know,” Kurt says. He leans in and gives Blaine a little kiss. “And to think… I was going to go to Dalton one day, to spy on the Warblers and see what the school was like, in case I could go somewhere else. I had my spy outfit ready and everything.  But I just… never went. I think the day I was going to go, I went to help at my dad’s garage instead. Dad was sick, and I knew Dalton was expensive but hospital bills were worse, so… I let go of that idea.”

“So what were you going to do? Did Karofsky back off at all? Wasn’t he scared you’d tell someone what was going on?”

Kurt looks down, somewhere near Blaine’s chin, and his voice seems strangely disconnected as he says, “He threatened to kill me if I told anyone. So… no, I wouldn’t call that backing off.”

Blaine can’t move at first, his body tensed with shock as his mind catches up with that statement. He knows, rationally, that he isn’t in the past and therefore can’t do anything about it. He nudges the shoebox between them farther down the bed and scoots closer so he can wrap his arm more fully around Kurt’s waist. He ducks his head to catch Kurt’s eye, and though he doesn’t say anything, Kurt understands what he’s asking.

“I didn’t know,” Kurt says.

_God._

“I didn’t transfer, but I couldn’t be there, so I just stopped going. Not every day, but sometimes it was too much and I didn’t know what else to do. The only way I knew I was safe is if I wasn’t there. So, I stopped going to Glee club, at first, because it kept me at school longer. And then I started missing a few class periods at the beginning of the day, or at the end, and then not showing up at all.”

“What did you tell the Glee club when you quit?”

“The truth. Karofsky being there meant I couldn’t be. He was always at school late because of football, and I wasn’t safe. They tried to get me to stay. They offered to protect me—to try to protect me, really, but they had no idea what that meant. I couldn’t put that on them and I already felt like—like I was losing it. Just the thought of being at school made me… um—”

Blaine reaches up and gently holds Kurt’s face. He can see it happening again, whatever it was that happened in the parking lot at Scandals.

Kurt nods, more to himself than to Blaine, and whispers, “I’m fine. I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?”

He looks up at Blaine and nods again, meeting his eyes as he takes as deep a breath as he can. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize, it’s okay.”

Kurt kisses him softly. “So. I started skipping school. Tina and Mercedes reached out, but I blew them off. And Finn helped cover for me; we were brothers and he wanted to keep me safe, and he didn't have a better way to do it. But Puck was the only one who said, ‘I get it. This place is shitty. Let’s go get McDonald’s.’”

Blaine laughs out loud, surprising them both, and Kurt smiles fondly at the memory. “He found me under the bleachers. Those were his exact words.”

“And you said yes?”

“I said yes. And that was it. Puck listened. He didn’t… I don’t know, give me that piteous look and tell me, ‘it gets better!’ I think he understood that it was getting harder for me to think that far ahead, anyway. He said he’d thought I was a badass ever since he got to know me in Glee club, because I was me no matter what, even when I got shit for it. So, we started hanging out.” Kurt laughs to himself for a few seconds before he says, “It didn’t take long after that for us to get arrested together.”

“I assume that turned out well, since you’re laughing about it. And not in prison.”

“Yeah. It wasn’t for anything serious. Someone called the cops because they saw us trespassing on a playground—at that abandoned school on the north side of town, so it doesn’t make sense to call that trespassing, but whatever—and it was after the minor curfew. We got caught when we tried to run. They started driving us back to the station, but I got them to let us go.” Kurt’s grinning smugly by the end of this statement, clearly proud of himself.

“What?! How?”

“Puck was freaking out because he had priors and he didn’t want to go back to juvie. I was freaking out because I knew my dad wouldn’t take it well and I didn’t want to stress him out. So, I started singing. Loudly. And, I know you haven’t fully heard it, but trust me when I say that my voice fucking carries, Blaine. I had no problem filling that cop car with noise. The siren had nothing on me.”

Blaine is giggling uncontrollably into his pillow. Who on Earth would think to do something like that?

“And when they were almost sick of me, like, promising to lock me away in one of those solitary holding cells when we got to the station, I told them everything that was wrong with their car. I could hear the start of a problem with their brakes, the kind of thing nobody would notice if they didn’t know what to listen for. And then I told them that Puck was the—what’s his position called? The one who catches the ball when the quarterback throws it?”

“The wide receiver.”

“Right. I told them Puck was the wide receiver who won McKinley’s championship game, and I asked if they really wanted to screw up McKinley’s best chance at another win by getting Puck in trouble for just being young and wanting to relax with his friends after all the stress of being one of McKinley’s most valued players.”

“You are incredible,” Blaine laughs. “You are a genius.”

“Yeah, well… Of course, Puck bragged about getting arrested at school the next day and told anyone who asked that the cops didn’t want to fuck with us, and that I was the smooth talker who got us out of it. Things started to change after that. People looked at me differently. I mean, the neanderthals still hated me, but I wasn’t invisible anymore, not the way I had been. I wasn’t just the gay kid from Glee club, who Puck happened to know. People at least knew that I hung out and did illegal things with Puck enough to get busted for it. You’re treated with a new level of respect when people think you’re not afraid of getting in serious trouble. I’d never been intimidating before. It was the first time in a long time that I felt even mildly safe.”

“Is that when you started dressing like you do now?”

“Mmm. I wanted to call it ‘The Skankening,’ but Puck said I was being too theatrical about it. Anyway, it wasn’t that dramatic of a change, not the way it eventually was for Quinn. I always had a taste for harder accessories, skulls, Docs, safety pins, hints of fashionable bondage, that sort of thing. I just started to take it in a more focused direction.”

“Vivienne Westwood meets Alexander McQueen?”

Kurt beams at Blaine’s references. “I knew I was right to keep you. Yes, they were my starting point. The hair was next, and then the piercings, because I had to wait until I turned eighteen for those. But when it all came together... People gave me my space. I could part hallways. And not too long after that, when Quinn had a breakdown and quit Glee, she joined us. She brought the cigarettes, at first. I would get really anxious and they helped calm me down a little.”

“What were you anxious about, if people stopped bullying you?”

Kurt shrugs. “I just get anxious sometimes. I worry about things. People. No reason.”

Blaine hugs him tighter and keeps listening.

“So, one night Quinn suggested we go to Scandals.”

“How did Quinn even know about Scandals?”

“Gay bars are perfect for straight girls who want to have fun without being bothered by creepy guys. Puck said no, but she and I went, and… that’s when I met Chandler.”

Blaine tenses.

“He was sweet,” Kurt says, shaking his head. “His energy was infectious. I remember feeling sexy for the first time.” He blushes as he says this, biting his lip as he looks up at Blaine. “I was a baby penguin, Blaine. I didn’t know much about sex, just whatever I’d learned from Quinn, which wasn’t very useful because that was straight sex, obviously. And all I’d experienced up until that point were unrequited, hopeless crushes on straight boys who didn’t want me, and an unrequited, horrifying crush from the one boy who did, so I was under the impression that that just wasn’t going to happen for me. But then there was Chandler, and he was attracted to me and he wasn’t shy about it. He liked me right away, and I liked the way he made me feel.”

“So you… hooked up with him?” Blaine doesn’t want to think about this. He doesn’t care that he isn’t Kurt’s first, though Kurt is his. The problem is, now that he’s met Chandler and has seen the way he looks at Kurt… it’s too easy to picture them together. It’s not a visual he really needs in his life.

“I’d always imagined it would be this big decision that I made with someone I loved, even though the minimal amount of porn I’d seen seemed to disagree. I—I’d always wanted romance, and I thought, maybe this was that whirlwind kind, like in the movies, you know? But… it took a lot less thought. It just happened. And I didn’t feel the way I thought I would afterwards.”

“How was it? I mean — not, _how was it_ , but… how did you feel?”

“Powerful,” Kurt says immediately, looking Blaine straight in the eye this time. “I was completely in control for once. He followed me around like a puppy, he adored me… I didn’t want to be vulnerable anymore, and I saw how he fell apart whenever we were together, so… I ran with it. I did whatever he asked for, and he thought I was being generous, but I just liked getting those reactions out of him. I liked knowing that I did that. And he hadn’t known me before. He only met the Skank. I didn’t tell him he was my first, and he couldn’t tell, so. He thought I was exactly what most people think when they see me.”

“So… you were taking what you needed, and he just thought you were… free-spirited?”

“Right. Giving, giving, giving, never receiving. But that powerful feeling didn’t last long. I got bored giving blowjobs, can you believe that?” Kurt snorts.

“That’s what you meant, when you said you weren’t a virgin but no one had seen you come?”

“Yes. I never gave him that power. I never wanted to, and since I didn’t really have those feelings for him, it was just… empty. Maybe I started taking the whole situation for granted. When he said he was moving, it was an easy out. He texted me all the time, but I didn’t respond. I didn’t feel like I needed him anymore.”

“What changed?”

“Everything. I had a different image at school, different friends. When someone pushed me, they got pushed back. I felt stronger, and—a-and sexier, thanks to the tryst with Chandler. And then Karofsky transferred at the end of the year. Besides, I think I was just… disappointed with what I was doing with Chandler. It felt cheap.”

“You don’t like cheap things,” Blaine murmurs, grinning crookedly at him.

“No, I don’t… I didn’t feel shame about it, until Chandler said what he said tonight.” Kurt’s face twists, and Blaine immediately reaches over and cups his cheek, his thumb rubbing gently. “Why didn’t I meet you sooner? Everything I thought sex would be… the feelings, the connection, that’s how it felt with you. I can’t believe I let it be anything less. I was so stupid—”

“Hey, hey, no. You weren’t stupid. It’s just… sex isn’t always like that. And I don’t think it has to be.”

“For me, I think it does. I wanted to be a badass, but I’m still just a silly romantic.”

“It’s not silly,” Blaine whispers, his voice insistent as he surges forward and kisses Kurt. He gets what Kurt means; nothing has ever felt like this, and now that he has Kurt, he can’t imagine anything being better. Kurt slides an arm around Blaine’s waist to pull their bodies flush against each other, completely relaxing against him as he tucks his face into Blaine’s neck. “I’m going to kiss you in front of everyone tomorrow,” Blaine says, sliding a hand into Kurt’s hair. “Just like I did before they scared me into holding back.”

“Are you sure? We never got a chance to talk about that…”

“We’ve talked a lot today. This isn’t something that I need to think about anymore.” It really isn’t; Whether the jealousy he furiously tried to contain at Scandals, seeing Kurt’s fears about not being enough to fight for as he is, or wanting to protect this special thing they have that makes them important to each other in a way no one else has ever been… Blaine can’t imagine keeping him at arm’s length, or as Kurt said, letting this be anything less.

“Thank you, for telling me everything. You’re the strongest person I know.”

Kurt grunts and starts kissing at Blaine’s collarbone.

“Um. Listen, I don’t _want_ us to stop, but we did promise your stepmom that we’d be on our best behavior.”

“You promised her that, not me. I don’t fucking care.”

“Baby…”

He feels Kurt smile against his skin at the pet name, even as Kurt sighs in frustration and pulls away.

“Fine, traitor. You can’t just kiss me and hold me like that and expect me to be the one who lets go.”

Butterflies erupt under Blaine’s skin at the way Kurt’s pouting so petulantly at him, his fist twisted up tight in the back of Blaine’s t-shirt. This vulnerable boy, who has spent a year building every wall imaginable in an effort to protect himself from being hurt, yet is so clearly affected by what Blaine does with him, letting Blaine be his rock, lying there sort of… needy and almost _submissive_ … _This_ is the power Chandler never got.

Kurt trusts him in a way neither of them have ever experienced, and Blaine shivers a bit at that realization.

“Blaine?”

His smile is a bit shaky as he shifts onto his knees and reaches over Kurt to get to the lamp on his nightstand, taking note of the way Kurt just lies there and watches him as he turns off the light. Then Blaine gently rolls Kurt onto his other side and snuggles against him from behind, making Kurt the little spoon, which he seems perfectly happy to be in this moment.

“I’m not letting go of you, either. Goodnight, Kurt.”


End file.
